Sunday, May 14, 2006
mother's day
Google's "today's quotation" from G.K. Chesteron:
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.My father was a jazz and literary critic who wrote Two Worlds of American Art: the private and the popular in which, as you can tell from the book's subtitle, he bore out Chesterton's point. Even in person, every day, he would praise some artistic endeavors as "1st class" or "magnificent" and dismiss others as "trash" or "second rate". Thank goodness for what little adolescent spunk I could summon, and for blankets and flashlights, or I would never have experienced the delights of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames, among other "trashy" joys. I completely stopped reading for a while, except for required school assignments, because I was judgmental about "bad" books, on the one hand, and only interested in them, on the other. Shortly after I got married, my husband and I found ourselves unprepared for an airplane trip and therefore without reading material. We found the airport store and he eagerly grabbed a Helen MacInnes story about Venice and asked me something along the lines of what did I want. I said a father-mimicking version of you must be kidding, I wouldn't read this junk. Knowing that it had been a long time since I read just for fun, he casually suggested I buy the junkiest book I could find. I scanned the over-wrought cover art and selected Peyton Place. I totally loved it and went on to read all of Grace Metalious's books and have been reading all kinds of both 'trashy' and 'good' books ever since, voraciously. So today, Mother's Day, my thanks to Chesterton for giving me a chance to remember, and to my children's father because of whom I stopped judging in such foolish ways and because of whose union with me and co-production of two wonderful people, I feel graced and loved today.
Labels: anniversaries, books, music, reflections
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